A History of English Literature

widely in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and modern languages, and was remarkable for learning in an age when a reader could know virtuall ...

Milton’s early Protestant ideals now seem at odds with his sophisticated Italianate style. At court, Charles I patronized the ba ...

And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropped into the western bay; At last he rose, and twitched his man ...

as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a g ...

Thus with the year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, o ...

Eve leads Adam to sin but also to repentance; blaming herself for the Fall, she proposes suicide. Milton types the sexes traditi ...

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first-created beam, and ...

property and, increasingly, money. New ideas were diffused in journals. By 1700 a book trade had begun to support writers, and t ...

often staged today. It was the source of the comedy-of-manners tradition in English writing: Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, R ...

Decide all controversies by Infallible artillery, And prove their doctrine orthodox By apostolic blows and knocks; Call fire and ...

defy, / Long be it ere thou grow old, / Aching, shaking, crazy cold; / But still continue as thou art, / Ancient person of my he ...

reason, recognize the power of Bunyan’s storytelling, and enjoy his homely shrewd- ness. But compared with the other English all ...

poems ‘Orinda’, to which members of her literary circle added the epithet ‘the matchless’. A neo-classical criticism was importe ...

Country Wife, spreads the (false) story that he is impotent, and no threat to womankind.His name,Horner, was then pronounced the ...

Dryden’s faith went from Puritan to Catholic; his style went from Metaphysical to Baroque to something clearer. His theatrical f ...

If this is not the faith of George Herbert, it at least makes sense in an area where reason could not help either Bunyan or Roch ...

In pious times, e’er Priest-craft did begin, Before Polygamy was made a sin; When man, on many, multiply’d his kind, E’er one to ...

Latin translation would cultivate the English, as Greek translation had cultivated the Romans. The success of Dryden’s Sylvae (1 ...

Thy lovers were all untrue. ‘Tis well an Old Age is out, And time to begin a New. At the end of a century where monarchical succ ...

diary, familiar letters, the essay, the ‘character’; romance and autobiography; history, criticism, philosophy, political though ...